Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister for Armaments, recalled in his
diary: “It was almost as if [Hitler] was in a delirium when he
described to us how New York would go up in flames. He imagined how the
skyscrapers would turn into huge blazing torches. How they would
crumble while the reflection of the flames would light the skyline
against the dark sky.” Hitler hated Manhattan. It was, he said, “the
center of world Jewry.”

Less than 60 years later,
Hitler’s plans were executed by Muslim immigrants living in Germany. At
the 2003 trial of the network around Mohammed Atta (the pilot who flew
into the World Trade Center), Shahid Nickels,
a German convert to Islam and a friend of Atta’s, said that the
Islamists had targeted Manhattan because it is “the center of world
Jewry, and the world of finance and commerce controlled by it.”

[The Basilica Cistern] is an underground chamber of 143 by 65 metres, capable of holding 80,000
cubic metres of water. The large space is broken up by a forest of 336 marble
columns each 9 metres high. The columns are arranged in 12 rows each
consisting of 28 columns. The capitals of the columns are mainly Ionic
and Corinthian styles, with the exception of a few Doric style with no
engravings. According to ancient historians, emperor Constantine
had already built a basilica and cistern on the same spot. As the
demand for water grew, emperor Justinian enlarged the cisterns and
incorporated the basilica. --Wikipedia

This incredible urban undergarment is open to the public, but be sure to book your flight to Istanbul not Constantinople.

Twenty years after he died in exile on St. Helena, Napoleon's body
was exhumed for reburial in Paris. The exceptional preservation of his
corpse, which could be chemically tested along with years' worth of
hair cuttings, revealed that his body contained high levels of arsenic.
The symptoms of Napoleon's final illness were also consistent with
arsenic poisoning. Armchair analysts theorized that he had been done in
by the British or by a jealous husband. But Emsley argues that Napoleon
was killed by his wallpaper—or more precisely, drawing on the work of
an Italian scientist named Bartolomeo Gosio, by the green, arsenic-rich
pigment in the wallpaper's star pattern.

At the end of the 19th
century, Gosio was prompted to investigate why so many Italian children
were inexplicably sickening and dying. Physicians suspected arsenic
poisoning. Gosio demonstrated that a microorganism that grew on the
flour-paste backing of the wallpaper could turn the arsenic in it into
a gas that was powerful enough to make people ill and even kill them.
If Napoleon chose the colors of his wallpaper to commemorate his
imperial colors, Emsley writes, "[H]e did himself no favours … though
they reminded him of his glorious past." Napoleon seems to have been a
victim, like so many others, of a surreptitious killer. But he may have
been poisoned by his own vanity rather than by a self-protective lover,
a grasping wife, or a woman like the Lucrezia Borgia of historical
repute.

Other uses of arsenic

Arsenic not only persists in the remains of anyone who has ingested or inhaled it, but it also acts as a preservative. It has been employed in embalming solutions and in dry preservatives used by taxidermists such as Becoeur soap , which was "made of arsenic powder, camphor, tartaric acid and lime" or "the arsenic soap made of white soap flakes, arsenic salts, potash, camphor, alcohol and water, borax powder . . . " etc. (Tissier & Migne). The "miraculous preservation" of corpses can sometimes be attributed to the presence of arsenic in the soil in which they have been buried .

There are several versions of the death of Henry II, Duke of Champagne, and king of Jerusalem (1166-1197). All of them, as Dorkafork explains, are pretty ridiculous:

During the Third Crusade, Henry II of Champagne, king of Jerusalem, perished due to defenestration. The story involves a first floor window and a dwarf. The version I read was that he tripped over his dwarf servant and fell out the window. Though this story has the most flair, I suspect it's the least likely. Other stories say the dwarf was just trying to pull him back up, and did not have mass on his side. In any case, by all accounts his dwarf servant fell out of the window as well, I guess there's no need to gild the lily. Some stories suggest that Henry would not have died if the dwarf had not landed on top of him.

There's a great story that goes with this particular Czech defenestration (there are at least three famous ones in history):

At Prague Castle on May 23, 1618, an assembly of Protestants (led by Count Thurn) tried two Imperial governors, Wilhelm Grav Slavata (1572–1652) and Jaroslav Borzita Graf Von Martinicz(1582–1649), for violating the Letter of Majesty (Right of Freedom of
Religion), found them guilty, and threw them, together with their
scribe Philip Fabricius, out of the high windows of the Bohemian
Chancellery. They landed on a large pile of manure and all survived unharmed. Philip Fabricius was later ennobled by the
emperor and granted the title "von Hohenfall" (lit. translating to "of
Highfall").

It sits in a small glass egg atop an inscribed marble base in the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza,
or the History of Science Museum in Florence, Italy. . . . The finger was removed by one
Anton Francesco Gori on March 12, 1737, 95 years after Galileo’s death.
Passed around for a couple hundred years it finally came to rest in the
Florence History of Science Museum. -- Curious Expeditions via Kircher

Both of these portraits are from Henry VIII's younger years. The first is a miniature by Lucas Horenbout, c.1526:The second is by Joos Van Cleve, c. 1535. No wonder he grew the beard.From the Hampton Court exhibit.

The boys who tended the dough in 18th century French bakeries worked in appalling conditions. This description comes from a review of Steven Laurence Kaplan's Good Bread Is Back:

To be a baker’s boy in eighteenth-century Paris must have been pretty
close to hell. You were effectively a slave, both to your master and to
the intricate demands of sourdough fermentation. The working “day”
began close to midnight. Wearing rough, uncomfortable underwear made
from old flour sacks, you were forced to knead as much as 200 lb of
dough at a time, using nothing but your hands and – in desperation –
your feet. This kneading took place not once but many times over the
night, usually in a clammy cellar too dark for you to see what you were
doing, and so hot that the dough sometimes melted before it had risen.
The baker’s boy in charge of kneading was known as le geindre, the
groaner, on account of the blood-curdling noises he made as he worked.
When you were finally granted rest, sometime in the morning, you were
obliged to sleep in the blinding heat of the bakery. After three hours,
you were forced to wake up again, to minister to the sourdough starter,
which, like a newborn child, required round-the-clock feeding. In 1788,
the journalist Louis-Sébastien Mercier described how unhealthy bakers’
apprentices looked. Unlike butchers’ boys, who were robust and ruddy,
bakers’ boys were flour-coated wretches, huddling in doorways, haggard
and white.